Top Proxies 2016

Welcome to Top Proxies, a free proxy list populated by our community of Internet users looking to remain anonymous on the web. Below you will find a list of proxy sites submitted by the public, that allow you to bypass your current network administrator or ISP’s restrictions.

Using a proxy you can unblock websites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail & popular game sites like MiniClip. Our ultimate goal is to keep a constant flow of working webproxies for you to use. We regularly test each proxy server to verify its location, speed, anonymity, and most importantly, that it is online and functioning. We place our most reliable and trusted proxies in our Featured Section below. If you’d like to submit your own sites to our Free Proxy List you can do so here.

If you’re unable to access the sites you want using a proxy you might want to try out a VPN – they’re cheaper than you might think and allow you to access ALL websites totally anonymously. Find out how VPNs work here.

The myth of free and unrestricted Internet

If you live in a free and democratic country, you may be under the impression that you enjoy free and unrestricted access to the internet, and that your activities online are not routinely tracked. In today’s world, the reality is there is virtually no privacy left on the internet. While you can refrain from talking to people in person, and cut yourself off from society to become an anonymous recluse, you cannot do the same on the internet. Governments today put considerable effort in knowing exactly what their citizens are doing on the internet, especially when it comes to illegal activities such as terrorism, cyber-crime, money-laundering etc. Although they justify their policies as necessary actions to ensure that they stay one step ahead of malicious users who use the internet for nefarious purposes, the fact remains that the privacy of individuals is being blatantly violated on a daily basis.

Your right to privacy and anonymity

Freedom on the internet has been advocated by many proponents as a universal right. People should not be forced to view the version of the internet their particular governments want them to.
Everyone the world over should enjoy:
Unrestricted access to content and websites on the internet. Users should have the freedom to access whatever they wish to access on the internet as long as the content is not related to illegal activities.
The right to online privacy – sadly this is one of the most violated rights because governments all over the world actively monitor the internet activity of their citizens.

How much can your IP address reveal about you?

Each computer is designated with a unique IP address when it connects to the internet. You can find out what yours is here. Now, while many people today are worried that their IP addresses could be used by someone to find out their identity, this is very unlikley to be possible. There are exceptions, however, and these give people reasonable grounds to be nervous. The (now defunct) controversial law firm ACS Law in England used IP addresses to trace users who had allegedly downloaded illegal content and extort heavy fines from them on behalf of its film studio clients. The firm ceased trading when it became obvious that the courts wouldn’t support the practice, but it did create an interesting and worrying precedent.

It must be noted that your identity cannot be discovered simply by looking at your IP address. A record of an IP address only provides information as to the location the user accessed the internet from for that particular session and the ISP who supplied the connection. Interestingly, the only reason that ACS Law were able to contact users directly about their internet usage was by issuing the user’s ISPs with court orders compelling them to reveal the identities of the users to whom the IP addresses had been allocated at the time of the alleged offences. This process was both costly and time-consuming for ACS Law which was one of the reasons their actions were seen in ‘bad faith’ as it was clear their intention was to profit from their activities rather than combat online piracy as they claimed.

Additionally, this was one of the reasons that their activities came under scrutiny as many users claimed that they had been incorrectly targeted and had never downloaded the files in question. The allocation of IP addresses is not an exact science, and it is hard to prove which user was using which IP address at a particular time. As long as reasonable doubt existed as the actual offender’s identity the courts were always likely to view such practices as legalised ‘shakedowns’.

It is also possible to track down which machine was used to access the internet, but that is not always harmful. The ease of tracking the location also depends on the type of IP. For example, it is relatively simple to track business users to their data centres, but it is significantly harder to track home network users to their city, or even sometimes their country. That being said, it is a little worrisome that the location from which you access the internet can be found using just your IP address. With more and more governments introducing new laws empowering them to monitor the internet and track users as and when they wish, IP addresses could be used to an even greater extent in the near future.

How easy is it for someone to find out your IP address?

Although your identity cannot easily be determined using your IP address, the IP itself is far from being secure from anyone who wants to discover it. The internet has evolved enormously since it first began, but that growth did not go hand-in-hand with advances in providing privacy and anonymity to users. This means that any web server of any website you visit can determine your IP address, as computers need this information in order to share data with one another. What’s more, these web servers can also find out more information about your set-up such the operating system and browser you’re using. This information, in the hands of malicious individuals, could potentially be used to harm your system.

What is a proxy server?

A proxy server is nothing more than a remote computer that you connect to the internet through (sometimes known as tunneling). When you try to access a website, your internet service provider (ISP) connects you to the website you enter into the address bar of your browser. Your ISP can see the IP address you’re connecting to, and the remote website you’re connecting to can see the your IP address. However, when you use proxy sites your request to connect to the remote website first goes to the proxy server, and then to the remote website. This means that the IP address that the web server of the remote website sees is that of the proxy server, rather than your own (see the diagram below). The obvious benefit of this is that it allows you to connect to websites that might otherwise be blocked as a result of geographical restrictions or government censorhip.

Can my ISP tell if I am using a proxy?

The simple answer to this is yes, your ISP can always tell if you are connecting to a proxy website, or other anonymisation service. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for doing so however, so this isn’t necessarily a problem in itself – many people for example use VPNs (virtual private networks) to connect securely to their server at work. Depending on what technique you are using your ISP may be able to see the data you are transmitting so, if you’re accessing information that is particularly sensitive, a proxy site isn’t likely to be the best solution. If you’re using a a simple proxy there is a good chance that the data you’re transmitting can be intercepted by your ISP. If, on the other hand you use a VPN your communications will be encrypted which means your ISP will be able to see the amount of data you’re transferring, but not the content of it. This is obviously a far better solution if, for example you’re sending sensitive commercial information, but a decent VPN will almost always come with a monthly subscription fee (though a very decent one can be had for just a few dollars a month). You can read more in the excellent article here.

Types of proxy

1. Open proxies

These proxy servers include HTTP and SOCKS proxies, which are servers accidentally left open on the internet onto which you can effectively piggyback. Such servers require you to configure your browser’s proxy settings to use them. Although they are quite easy to use in that they are compatible with most webpages, there are significant drawbacks. You can find out more about the difference between HTTP and SOCKS proxies here.

2. Reverse proxies

Reverse proxy servers are used to pass requests from the internet to private networks through a firewall. This prevents anyone from accessing sensitive data on a private network with any sort of monitoring.

3. Web proxies

These are the most common type of proxy servers and they do not require any tweaking in the settings of your web browser. All you need to do is visit any one of the proxy websites that provide you with a proxy server list, like the one above ↑ (shameless plug for our own site). The proxy list is normally free to access, as are the the proxy sites listed. Just click on one of the listings that looks suitable and you’ll most likely be taken to a simple-looking site with a prominent input box to enter the URL you wish to visit. These proxy websites are normally free as they are supported by advertising ie they display advertising banners. All being well, once you input your chosen URL and hit ‘Go’ you should then be re-directed to the site you want to visit. These free web proxies offer the simplest way to unblock sites, but they are not always effective, and quite frequently offer slow speeds due to high user traffic.

What can you use proxies for?

1. To unblock websites

One of the commonest reasons for using a proxyserver is for people to to hide their IP address with a view to accessing content that is blocked in their region. As mentioned above, IP addresses can be used to identify the geographic location a user is accessing the internet from. When governments or web services enforce geo-restrictions, they look at the IP address of all incoming requests to determine which part of the world the request is coming from. If the request comes from an area where the service is not provided then access is not granted to that request. If you use a webproxy however, the IP address visible to others will be that of the proxy, and you can unblock websites easily (assuming of course that the unblock proxy you are using is not based in the same banned region as you are). Some proxy lists also state the actual geographical location of the servers so users can select a US proxy or a UK proxy, for example, depending on their requirements. As using a proxy bypass, however, is such a quick and easy process, it is normally no trouble to use simple ‘trial and error’ to find one that will unblock the sites you want to visit without knowing the actual physical location of the ones you are testing.

2. To increase connection and download speeds

When you use an anonymous server to access websites, the response from the webserver is stored in the cache of the proxy. This means that the second time you make that same request the proxy server itself provides you the result, rather than the actual website. This automatically enhances your connection speed (to that website) since the response time to access it is reduced. This can be very helpful for users who want to repeatedly download files – for example when all the individual workers in an office need to download the same Windows updates. You can find a very helpful video on this subject on YouTube here.

3. To hide your identity & browsing activity

When you use proxy services, all your traffic is first redirected to those websites and then to the web server you’re ultimately looking to reach. This means that your identity is hidden from the websites you are visiting, since they do not record your actual IP but that of the webproxy you are using. This could be helpful for business users, for example, to spy on competitors’ websites without leaving a footprint.

Speed and performance of free proxy sites

The speed of connection can increase when you use a proxy server because the cached results help reduce response time. However, if you use sites that offer ‘free’ proxy lists, your connection speed is likely to be reduced due to the high volume of users online consecutively. For browsing websites a proxy will normally be perfectly sufficient but for streaming video etc you would generally be much better off with a VPN if your budget permits.

Free proxy sites are most popular with users who simply want to access blocked websites in their region and don’t care about encrypting their connection. However, these free sites cannot always help you to browse all the blocked websites you wish to access as they can easily be blocked themselves by governments, ISPs or destination sites such as YouTube, Netflix etc.

Region-specific proxies can help you access content available only in certain parts of the world. For example, you can use USA or UK proxies to access content that is available only in those countries, like Netflix USA or BBC iPlayer in the UK. As mentioned above though, the download speeds achieved are likely to be sub-standard and a VPN will be a better solution.

We hope the above information has given you a good introduction to the subject of proxies and will help you to access the content you want to on the internet, despite the best efforts of the powers that be.